The present invention generally relates to location estimation, and more particularly relates to estimating the location of users based on social networking messages.
Recent years have seen a rapid growth in social network services and social network messaging. This has spurred numerous research efforts to mine data from social networking messages for various applications, such as event detection, epidemic dispersion, and news recommendation. These and many other applications can benefit from information about the location of users. However, location data associated with social networking messages is currently very sparse or even non-existent.